Higher Ground aims to make impact

Expect to hear more from Hubie Jones in 2011 about Higher Ground, a new nonprofit he has formed and modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York.

“It’s our version of it,” said Jones, who has a long history of leadership with Boston-area nonprofits and foundations, and is the founder of the Boston Children’s Chorus.

Higher Ground has selected the nearly 300-unit Warren Gardens housing development in Roxbury as its initial “impact area” — in fact, the tenants have asked the organization to work there, Jones said — in addition to some of the surrounding streets in the neighborhood. The organization will bring a concentration of services to the impact area — directing families to child care and social services they need, helping teens (particularly 14- and-15-year-olds) find jobs, offering summer programs, and bringing existing organizations, like BELL (Building Educated Leaders For Life), into the neighborhood that have created successful solutions elsewhere. Jones said Higher Ground also is considering the role it can play in school reform.

Nearly 150 nonprofits exist near Warren Gardens — in the Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester neighborhoods — Jones said, “but we’re not getting the results we should be getting.”

Higher Ground has drawn a weighty board of directors with Charlotte Golar Richie, senior vice president at YouthBuild USA, as president; William Pinakiewicz, director of the New England program for the Nonprofit Finance Fund, as treasurer; and Clarence Cooper, a senior fellow at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, as secretary.

The organization needs to raise between $500,000 and $600,000 in its first year and, although it has raised some of that money, a big step toward its financial goal could come in January, when Jones expects to hear whether the organization has received a $175,000 grant from the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley.

Jones and other nonprofit leaders traveled to New York City last May to observe the Harlem Children’s Zone, which comprises 97 city blocks and brings together social service programs targeting that specific geographic area. President Barack Obama has expressed interest in replicating it in corridors of poverty throughout the country.

For his part, Jones has been intent on bringing such a focused network of resources and services to some of Boston’s most challenged neighborhoods.

“We’re pledging to everyone that if Higher Ground can’t bring resources into the community that wouldn’t exist, we shouldn’t exist,” Jones said.